Everyone knows the traditional image of Sherlock Holmes. An artist only needs to touch in a deerstalker hat, a checked Inverness cape, large curved pipe and a magnifying glass: then if you just add the words ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ the world famous icon is complete. It’s an epitome of the figure which first seized public attention in 1891, when Arthur Conan Doyle began publishing short stories about Sherlock Holmes in the new London monthly magazine, The Strand. To become a best-seller like that a writer of crime stories has to embody in the detective a set of values which the audience finds convincing, forces which they can believe will work to contain the disorders of crime. What then were the values that gave power to the Holmes phenomenon — what does the great detective stand for?

In the first place he stands for science, that exciting new nineteenth-century force in the public mind. Doyle said in his memoirs that contemporary crime fiction disappointed him, because it depended so much on luck for a solution: the detective should be able to work it all out. So the overt techniques of science, the careful collection and rational analysis of information, were realised in Sherlock Holmes. He can explain the causes of material evidence either by ‘the science of deduction’ as Doyle calls it, or through his knowledge of forensic facts and criminal history. That was a vividly contemporary and credible force against crime. But it also had its inherent drawbacks, as many people found facts and objective science potentially anti-humane: Charles Dickens’ automaton teacher Mr Gradgrind is a fictional realisation of that fear. Darwin’s theory of evolution was a real scientific cause of alarm, insisting as it did that men and animals weren’t truly different. Naked science could itself appear to be a disorderly force. Doyle avoided such a bad aura by making the second major value of his great detective that equally potent contemporary force — individualism: the essence of humanity as it seemed to many then, and now. Holmes isn’t only a man of objective science: he’s also aloof, arrogant, eccentric, even bohemian. His exotic character humanises his scientific skills: a lofty hero, but crucially a human one.